Insights: E-Reads and Articles on Decision Making
Insights

Improving the decision process

The paradox world of bad decisions
  The Abilene Paradox
Reading time: app. 15min.
Summary: Instead of improving decision making, too much respect and regardfulness may lead to poor decisions when ruling is done by a committee.
Project Selection - a Pitfall
Reading time: app. 5min.
Summary: Ensuring that the right project portfolio is selected and that work will be done in the right order, with appropriate priorities and with objectives aligned with the corporate objectives ensures that the best is made from the resources available.
The Sunk Cost Dilemma
Reading time: app. 25min.
Summary: The Sunk Cost Dilemma describes a game theory situation in a 1-player game, where the sum of a sequence of good decisions is one big bad decision.
The Creeping Scope
Reading time: app. 25min.
Summary: While project documentation is incomplete from the start, there is a tendency that it will also differ from the work actually done. This deviation is further growing the nearer the project comes to its end.
How can one overcome this dilemma?
Executive summary:
Ensuring that the right project portfolio is selected and that work will be done in the right order, with appropriate priorities and with objectives aligned with the corporate objectives ensures that the best is made from the resources available.

Project Selection - a Pitfall

Are we running the best possible project portfolio?

By Oliver F. Lehmann, PMP

The double work project

It was at a major IT company where I have been doing many trainings, that somebody told me the following story:

A project had been set up to research what kind of activities are done twice in the company by different business units. The company management expected that identifying and avoiding double work instead of again and again re-inventing the wheel could contribute to major cost savings.

The team spent months on research in the company, and in point of fact, they found many identical or very similar activities, and some of them have not only been done twice but even three times and more. A great potential to cut costs and free resources by streamlining processes, re-defining responsibilities and organizational interfaces and re-thinking the corporation's project portfolio.

Then, the group experienced a big surprise: There was a second project run by another organizational unit; and this project had the same purpose: Identification of double work.

Optimizing project portfolio management

Well working project portfolios are key to company success. Ensuring that all important work is selected and will be done in the right order, with the right priorities and with objectives aligned with the corporate objectives ensures that the best is made from the resources available.

Insight Tree can optimize a decision with multiple options taken against a predefined budget constraint. Read the tutorial article on Nonlinear, constrained optimization to learn how to make the best selection with the highest pay-off from a list of projects.
Visionary Tools Daniel & Oliver Lehmann
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Bavaria, Germany
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